What irks me about Unix mail

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

The only standard mail facility on UNIX supports mail to the local
users and via UUCP (onehost!another!whoever) but that is all.  The
USENET is UUCP-based and has several independent, not fully correct,
message handling programs.  Many of the people contributing to the
newsgroups are on a non-UUCP network such as BITNET, CSNET, or MILNET/
ARPANET.  Net addresses for such folks are totally foreign to standard
UNIX mail facilities, and even the extended message/news handlers have
trouble at times sending mail across different networks.  The Internet
concept is supposed to provide a "global" network addressing scheme,
but until there is a UUCP domain name server USENET will not conform
to the Internet protocols.

The situation is not much different from VMS (which can speak DECNET
and some Internet); the problem shows up more strongly in the UNIX
world since the UNIX system is running in so many different networking
environments.